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c h a p t e r s e v e n Shifting Ground its years of turmoil behind it, the new American red cross finally seemed to be standing on solid ground. President Theodore roosevelt enthusiastically supported it, upright businessmen and eminent government officials made up its governing central committee, and mabel Boardman eagerly took on the daily tasks of running the organization. Then on April 18, 1906, when a monstrous earthquake shuddered through san Francisco, a serious structural flaw in the organization became apparent: with clara Barton and her assistants eliminated, the Arc had nobody on staff with any experience in disasters. To fill this vacuum, the organization began hiring trained social workers to serve in disaster-relief operations. Unlike their amateur predecessors in organized charity, the new philanthropic professionals believed in providing direct material assistance to people in need, especially widows, children, and the disabled. At the same time, they held a deep suspicion of potential charity recipients and a preoccupation with keeping able-bodied men off the relief rolls and in the labor pool. They also emphasized the application of depersonalized business methods to charitable enterprises, eschewing Barton’s individualized approach. The new Arc leaders meanwhile began to act like corporate managers and bankers . They maintained the san Francisco relief funds in an interest-earning account, developed an elaborate accounting system, and parsed out grants and loans over time, while supervising relief recipients with the same coercive attention to efficiency that Frederick Winslow Taylor’s apostles were beginning to apply on the factory floor. Just as Taylorism brought workers under a new regime of factory discipline designed to maximize productivity, the new relief methods subjected disaster survivors to a strict regime of requirements designed to maximize the individuals’ utility in the industrial economy. This approach, encouraged by roosevelt as a means to restore public confidence in the organization after the scandals of the previous years, drew support and admiration from the business elite. But it alienated many of the people the Arc sought to help.1 Shifting Ground 117 The Arc’s embrace of managerialism also led to a fundamental shift in the way its leaders interpreted the ideal of humanity. humanity now entailed the development and management of a humanitarian organization that could efficiently and effectively reduce human suffering on a large scale: it no longer centered on personalized expressions of sympathy, caring attention to individual human needs, or collaborative engagement of people in their own recovery. This change reflected a turning point in the history of the humanitarian ideal, in which the moral passions that had fueled nineteenth-century humanitarian projects, from abolitionism to the red cross movement , were being replaced with standards of rationality and efficiency. The new ethos reflected Progressives’ obsession with reordering the world to limit unnecessary waste and make organizational systems work better. it also enabled humanitarian organizations like the Arc to more easily graft their agendas onto larger twentieth-century projects of corporate capitalism, state building, and imperialism.2 The Arc’s operational definition of neutrality also changed. While Barton had infused this ideal with a commitment to social egalitarianism and political independence , it now came to connote dispassionate, objective, scientific evaluation and management of a population’s needs. The systematization of relief, by increasing the Arc’s power to aid large numbers of people, represented an improvement over Barton ’s erratic methods. however, whereas Barton’s personal ideals had helped turn the Arc away from prevalent racial, ethnic, and religious prejudices, systematization exposed relief recipients to the impersonal biases of relief administrators toward various populations. neutrality also no longer involved operating independently from powerful political, business, and military interests. instead, beginning with the san Francisco earthquake, the Arc used its neutral status to negotiate working relationships with various business and government interests and thus develop a unified and effective relief program. This shift in stance led to a paradoxical result after the earthquake : the Arc distributed far more material aid to all classes of people than it ever had under Barton. however, it supported a long-term rebuilding effort in which the business class increased its power and influence, while the health and living situations of many poor, working-class, elderly, chinese, and Japanese san Franciscans deteriorated . devine intervention The news of the san Francisco earthquake did not reach Washington until a day after it occurred, because the seismic shocks had severed telegraph and telephone wires between san Francisco and the outside world. When word finally seeped out...

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